One of the strangest things I come across when I talk to people who have an online business is the fact that many of the online business owners are afraid. It’s strange because it is such a common issue, it is also understandable.

When you work online a ‘business’ these days is anything you do on the web which will get you noticed and be translated into cash. You could be running an eCommerce store but it is also equally possible that you have set up a page on Facebook, you have a blog somewhere, you post YouTube videos or you have a Twitter account. In short, you are active in much of what is the real-time web and you are looking to somehow capitalize on it.

There are so many different ways of ‘working’ online today that many of us do not even realize it is work, but work it is in the sense that it is an investment in time and effort with the expectation of some kind of gain in the end, so it is fair to say that online business population is growing all the time. Fair enough, you will probably say, so why the fear?

Well, that part is easy to understand. You got online and invested your own effort, expertise, knowledge, passion, drive and energy. You may have invested some money by way of either acquiring knowledge or getting some hardware or software or all three and now you are ready to do ‘business’. If you are like 99.5% of the people I see and advise the business you expect never comes. The web is an active medium that’s actively consumed and requires action to pay off. The ‘build it and they will come’ approach to online marketing never works and it never will. Active marketing, however, also means ‘putting yourself out there’, exposing your passion and beliefs and dreams and the moment you realise that you also realise that you could be wrong. You could fail. And you’re afraid.

Fear of failure, fear of suddenly revealing ourselves to the world and fear that what made sense in our heads at three o’clock in the morning and which now has become a website may not be so cool after all, all conspire to create a passivity when it comes to SEO and online marketing of an online business that tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom.

The simple truth is that the web is growing at a phenomenal pace, more than 200,000 websites and blogs each day according to the latest count by ComScore. The online population is also growing but its available time to spend online is decreasing and more and more people spend their online time in fewer and fewer places (like Facebook for instance). When you take all this into account you realise that unless you are prepared to really test your belief in yourself, you are not really going to get anywhere. This means getting rid of your fear.

I know that this is not easy to do. Fear of failure is often the result of the realisation that the web is an awful big place and that there is a lot of work which needs to be done. Forget about both of these. The size of the web and the amount of work which need to be done is immaterial. Instead, focus on a plan which gives you specific actions of publicity to do each day and those actions, themselves, need to be reduced into a series of steps.

One classic example is the work done by a colleague at Galapagos Traveller. The website requires constant online marketing and needs to be visible in hundreds of places on the web. Instead of balking at the task which adds to the burden of actually running the physical part of the business he simply starts each day with a 90 minute online marketing session which consists of the use of Facebook, Twitter, articles and Press Releases. He is disciplined. Ninety minutes a day, every day, gives him 45 hours of online promotion a month and the website’s sales of Galapagos Tours reflects the quality of the work he puts in. Is he afraid of failure? Yes, he was. Right up to the moment we talked and he realised that unless he gave himself a set task to do each day and simple went on and did it, fear would keep him paralyzed right up to the moment his business failed.

Discipline is the only antidote to fear that I know to work every time in every context. I have seen firemen dive into a fire to check if a building which was ablaze is clear of people and I have seen troops train using live ammo in situations which differ little from a warzone and in each case what kept them alive and helped them succeed against the odds was the fact that they were disciplined and simply followed their training, doing the unthinkable by breaking it down into small, do-able steps.

Working online is about the safest job there is. Last time I checked there were no falling timbers nor flying bullets. You sit in a chair and work your brain. Occasionally your fingertips as you type something or your trigger finger as you right-click on your mouse. Fear is a luxury we allow ourselves. Get rid of it and make your dreams work.